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Sociolinguistics
In second semester of second year, I was presented with the opportunity to develop and apply my conversation analytic skills in a module on Sociolinguistics. Having spent the last semester believing I had found my one true special interestAutism.org.uk (2017) Obsessions, repetition, routines - NAS. online Available at: http://www.autism.org.uk/about/behaviour/obsessions-repetitive-routines.aspx##obsessions 10 May 2017., I became equally as enthused with the work of sociologist Erving Goffman. I voraciously read his work, flapping my armsAutism.org.uk (2017) Obsessions, repetition, routines - NAS. online Available at: http://www.autism.org.uk/about/behaviour/obsessions-repetitive-routines.aspx##obsessions 10 May 2017. in excitement when I read a particularly pertinent-to-my-life section. For 20 years, I had been making silent noticings about the singularities of the social world around me, and here they all were (and more), noticed by another and captured so very eloquently. Being introduced to Goffman's work felt like discovering the social etiquette handbook I had wished existed for so long. Face At the centre of Goffman's legacy sits the notion of face. Face, he argued, is the driving force behind why we do what we do, in the way that we do it. It seems tautologous to say, but when we interact, we attempt to present ourselves in a way which we hope others view us. When we enter an interaction, the things we do form the basis for others' expectations of us, by the line they assume we have taken. If we present in a way which is accepted by others, then we have preserved our face. If we present in a way which exceeds others' expectations of us, then we have gained face. Goffman defines face as some sort of 'positive social value' which stems from how we believe we are viewed by others, but those words do not quite allow for the more nuanced accepted interpretation. Yes, we strive for 'positive social value', but what that 'positive social value' is depends on the individual – to what one person ascribes value, another may not. The counterpart to this is that we can also earn negative social value during interactions. This occurs when we believe we fall short of the expectations we believe others hold of us. If this is the case, then we have lost face. Certain actions can be face-threatening, and so there are interactional tools at our disposal to safeguard ourselves against potential loss of face. These are called politeness strategies. Of course, being able to manage your own and others' face requires the ability to theorise about the state of mind of others – how will I be perceived if I do X? How will doing Y make them feel? Will I be imposing on them if I do Z? ''This is called theory of mind, and is something autistic people display difficulties with. These concepts are hopefully the starting point for my next academic venture, investigating face in autistic adults. If autism affects one's abilities to infer about the motives and desires of others, then it is likely that the attribution of intentions to others' will be affected also, and so will face. In an article from 2012, highlighting the recent shift from cognitive deficit theories of autism to more motive-based theories, Chevallier et al.Chevallier, C., Kohls, G., Troiani, V., Brodkin, E. S. & Schultz, R. T., (2012) The social motivation theory of autism. ''Trends in cognitive sciences, Vol. 16 (4), pp. 231–239. state that "ASD can be construed as an extreme case of diminished social motivation and, as such, provides a powerful model to understand humans’ intrinsic drive to seek acceptance and avoid rejection." As face is arguably at the core of social acceptance and social rejection, it seems surprising to me that there is so little research so far on autism and face theory. Politeness Politeness is the act of redressing potential face-threatening acts. For example, requesting another person to shut the window both imposes on the requestee's autonomy, and carries with it the risk of the requester being denied. A potential politeness strategy that reduces potential threat is to redress it and allow the recipient to infer the request and offer to do it instead: A: Do you think it's cold in here? B: Shall I close the window? In conversation analytic literature, it is dispreferred to make a request of someone, compared with receiving an offer, and so interactants may engineer slots for offerings to reduce potential face-threat. However, as politeness strategies generally work because of participants' abilities to infer meaning, I continued to wonder what this means for people who struggle with inferencing and pragmatics. Jackendoff speculates "that human beings have a need to “tune” their conceptualizations to those of others — to have a common understanding of the world. Since we cannot read minds, the only way we can assess our attunement is by judging whether the behavior of others — including what they say — makes sense"Jackendoff, R. (2002) Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press., but if my judgement of your behaviour is wrong, then our understanding of the world will not be common, and this can lead to all sorts of interactional and interpersonal problems. Relational Work I matured as a politeness researcher and graduated from Brown and Levinson's universals to Locher & Watts' relational work. It was this that sparked the idea for my sociolinguistics project on workplace interaction which, once finished, I co-authored a conference paper on with Andrew Merrison at LIAR IV. Relational work moves away from the idea of universally (im)polite acts and emphasises the importance of context, arguing, for example, that some ostensibly polite utterances could be contextually very impolite because of what the politeness connotes. For instance, a boss telling an employee to do their job would come across as insincere and passive aggressive if they said "I'm really very sorry, but would you be ever so kind as to get back to work?" The relational work model argues that appropriacy is determined not by the words themselves but the words within a particular context. For instance, I was on the train a few weeks ago, ready to show my E-ticket to the conductor. The conductor took one look at my ticket and told me it wasn't valid, and instructed me to follow him. As I scurried to the back of the train, my friend called after me "show him your autism card!" to which the conductor was taken aback. He asked me if I knew him and, upon establishing that I did, explained to me that it was inappropriate for him to say things like that. To me, though, it was incredibly appropriate. My friend – who had accompanied me to one of my autism assessment appointments, who had been there when the "autism card" joke was born – telling me to show the conductor my autism card was simply (or actually rather complexly) indexical of our friendship. Of course, if relational work takes into account appropriacy, then it is something that may be affected by autism. What I find to be an appropriate way of indexing a friendship may not be deemed appropriate by wider society. But I have come to a point now where I realise that this does not really matter. I'm not interacting with wider society. I'm interacting with my friends – my friends who know what is appropriate in my eyes and so it becomes appropriate in theirs. I think one of the main reasons I have overcome so much of my social anxiety and become so comfortable in my interactional abilities over the past two years is that I have been able to see interaction as a mechanism – something systematic, almost predictable, rather than this vast, confusing sea of meanings, facial expressions and non-verbal cues that it once appeared to be. __FORCETOC__